"Spring Breakers" or What Happens When You Mix A Clockwork Orange, Scarface, and MTV

When I heard about Spring Breakers, a film about a group of college girls who attend a Spring Break bash in Florida, which stars former Disney Channel stars Selena Gomez and Vanessa Hudgens, I thought it was going to be a light-hearted teen comedy about these girls getting into shenanigans and finding romance during Spring Break, so of course I had no interest in it. Then when I saw the first trailer for Spring Breakers, it was not that all. It seemed like it was going to be a crime-drama story about these girls partying way too hard, end up getting in trouble, getting bailed out by a rapper/drug lord and while some try to escape a life of crime, and some are tempted into it. This intrigued me as it seemed that the film wanted to tell a story about being in a strange and dangerous environment and the hard methods to escape it. So I finally saw Spring Breakers and what is the real story? A group of college girls named Faith (Selena Gomez), Candie (Vanessa Hudgens), Brit (Ashley Benson), and Cottie (Rachel Kornie) want to escape their dull school life and head off to a Spring Break party at a beach in Florida. Some of the girls actually rob a fast food restaurant in order to finance their trip. While at Spring Break the girls party, dance, drink, do drugs, and all sorts of wild activities. That is until they are caught by the police for doing drugs and are put in jail. They are later bailed out by a rapper/drug dealer who goes by the name of Alien (James Franco), who takes a liking to the girls. Alien offers them the fun life if they do some of his dirty work for him as a price. Some of the girls try to run away from this life, while some actually find sweet pleasure in it. So I got some of what I expected, the others I did not expect should in reality force me to hate to this film. But as unexpected, they were worked great to the film's advantage. What I got out of Spring Breakers was not a story but a dark and disturbing experience. An experience that was highly effective.


Selena Gomez plays Candie, a church going good girl, but who of course decides to join her friends to experience Spring Break to escape her boring college life. She's considered to be most sensible, conscience, and actually sane one of the group as she is actually horrified of the methods were friends practiced in order to gain money for their trip and the life that Alien lives. I got the feeling that director Harmony Kornie told Gomez to just be herself not any other character or personality. This may seem like a horrible and non-creative decision made out by both the director and the actor, but watching the overall film I think it works perfectly and it adds to the atmosphere and uncomfortable dark experience this film was going for. Vanessa Hudgens as Candie and Ashley Benson as Brit are basically the same type of characters, which is why I am going to be talking about both. In reality I should totally hate these characters, as in most of the time in a film that tried to tell a linear and developed story, they would see one dimensional as they carry the same type of personality the whole way through. They are seductive, gun loving, horny, bad girls who want to do nothing else but party, have fun, and be bad while doing it. During the beginning I found myself to be quite annoyed by the two, as I wanted them to be more developed and more dimensional. Like what is their family life like, who are their parents, what kind of students are they, are they dumb, are they geniuses, what was their childhood like, and most importantly what drove them to be the type of girls they are? I felt like none of these were answered but after going more in the film I started to think about Alex DeLarge from A Clockwork Orange, played by Malcolm McDowell. It made sense for him to be a completely sadistic character because the film had already set up such a disturbed and dystopian world where the character himself would actually grow more aware and sane which made him interesting. What makes these characters also end up being interesting is that the film is set not in a dystopia, not in a disturbed post-apocalyptic world, but in our reality. But instead Harmony Kornie uses our reality to make an actually disturbed experience. So with these girls providing an advantage to the film to express its tone, we desperately want to know more about them as they seem to us that they are not from this world, but the scary truth is that they are. The scarier truth is that they are people out there like them, but whats even scarier is that we do not understand their mind or how differently they see the world apart from normal citizens. These Vanessa Hudgens and Ashley Benson were definitely told by Kornie to not be themselves and to get lost inside these characters. It worked, Hudgens and Benson actually surprised me that they can be good actors in these roles, and what made their characters ultimately interesting was that they were effectively portrayed what they had to represent. Cottie, played by Rachel Kornie, who is also the wife of director Harmony Kornie, is sort of the naive and stupid one of the group. But at the same time she is sort of developed in this decent way that you can actually feel sorry for her. You know a lot of the decisions she makes are not the right decisions, but you know that all she wants to do is have fun and be with her friends no matter what she has to do in order to get it, which actually makes naive personality tolerable and you can understand she does not know any better. Finally we have Alien, played by James Franco, and although there a couple of more really good and interesting characters in the film, Alien by far is the most entertaining. He's charismatic, funny, uncomfortable, threatening, mysterious, and a scene stealer. Any scene he's in, even when its funny, you can ask yourself "Am I really supposed to be laughing here?" because at a lot of times you do not know when he's clowning around or when he's dead serious. And no matter what you get from it, laughter or legit seriousness, it still comes across as effectively uncomfortable. Alien is the type of person who you do not want to have any type of relationship with, you do not want to get mixed in with his life. He is the type of person that is the embodiment of the last person you want to run into on the street or want to have a conversation with. The scenes that include him are very well done as it captures the tone of having a conversation with an uncomfortable stranger who you can tell is bad news. This probably the best performance I had ever seen out of James Franco. He completely nails it by perfectly portraying the type of person he is supposed to represent, and he is totally lost in him .



I stated this before that Spring Breakers is more of an experience that it is a coherent and linear story. It is a chain of uncomfortable and strange events that happen because of cause and effect. Films in my opinion can be a story, an experience, or both, and here its both. The film is telling you a story yes but it is not really a story with the usual set up of a beginning, middle, and end, it just shows you a string of events and what led to those events. Heck, a lot of the scenes are sometimes difficult to make out because they would foreshadow scenes and dialogue in random places, yet they would also repeat scenes and dialogue in random places, the whole film feels like you're drunk or not sober, therefore helping truly experience the atmosphere of the film. It's like you are actually there with the characters or you are watching it through a home video. The film is more about the study of the characters and the people they interact with more than a story. The film allows you to be in the story instead of telling it to you. And it did its job very well. Right after I saw the film and left the theater I was speechless. Not speechless as this film blew my mind (well later it did), but as in I did not know what to say or make of it. It is hardly like any film I have seen before. I felt like I was experiencing a hangover, like I could not make sense of what I just saw or experienced, but to the film's defense I think that's the reaction that people are suppose to get out of it. You experienced a harsh reality and what happens when people choose separate pathways of life, and believe it or not stuff like this does happen daily. The whole film felt like you were at a party that seems fun but then you want to leave because you feel awkward and uncomfortable, but then you have to experience the aftermath of that party and the people you are surrounded with. A lot of the scenes also that have no dialogue and the characters are just thinking are effective as well as not only do you feel you are with the character but you definitely know what's going through their head. With it' set up, atmosphere, and characters Spring Breakers definitely made us experience what harshness reality can bring and it does it in a genius way. One of the most originally done films I have seen in a while and as of right now it has already become my top favorite of 2013. That may seem like a bit of a stretch, but its the truth.

GRADE: AE
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